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Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

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Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#301

Post by torginus »

kangalioo wrote: post #46

The "frontend skills" whose growing irrelevance are bemoaned in this article consist largely of navigating a minefield of unintuitive edge cases, browser incompatibilities, historic baggage, exceptions to exceptions to exceptions. Modern frontend, or the "tower of leaky abstractions", is finally a common-sense mental model for web development. Supplanted by force on top of an exploding bag of eccentricities that is w…

I'm not an expert, but I do ship frontends that muggles (the public) get to see, and my understanding is that frontend is like the yellow brick road in the Wizard Of Oz - if you don't veer of a small set of okayish best practices, then you can deliver a pretty good experience with a small set of boring and established libraries. But if you start interacting with FOTM amazing frontend frameworks of today (or even worse, of yesterday), have to cater for the weird quirks and preferences of other devs who do things in a very particular way, or 'ingenious' hacks and weird stuff held together by hopes and dreams and duct tape, the complexity and the number of ways these worlds can interact rises exponentially.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#302

Post by visarga »

customguy wrote: post #56
aspenmartin wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, other people did. They wrote about it, and LLM can sometimes use that. Once they no longer write about it, what then? It can read the code? Historical discussions around it? Commit histories? > But even then, people aren't entitled to the knowledge "created" by doing the work. If attribution and compensation were tackled in earnest, if you could only train on the materials of the people you pay to produce those…

> It can read the code? Historical discussions around it? Commit histories? Assume everybody is now using LLM because they're better, and because the people who created artisanal things in their free time out of sheer generosity no longer have free time, or any food at all, or simply no longer feel generous. And the few people who are such specialists that they would be slowed down by them only do proprietary work, f…

> What then? LLM learning from LLM doesn't really work, does it?

It does work, it is called RLVR, reinforcement learning from verified rewards, is is based on testing code by execution. It's become a major area of improvement in the last year. But you are also forgetting the amount of steering and problem solving going into coding agents today, and the huge logs they create which can feedback into training. We automated stackoverflow, LLM learns from usage and self play.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#303

Post by s1ngular1ties »

aiisahik wrote: post #299

Anyone who cares about the "craft" and "quality" of frontend or any other domain of programming should LOVE all the LLMs because it actually enables high code quality at very low cost. You can enforce best practices, do full code refactors, write as many tests as you want and you can do it without telling management that you need to stop writing code for 2 weeks for "tech debt". All you need is one guy with a lot of…

Amen. I feel like I live in a different world than many of the commenters here. AI has made it such that most code “vibe coded” follows our root architectural practices by default. I couldn’t be more thrilled, and watching how enabled people are with this in their hands is amazing! I feel for the people in the thread who aren’t getting or feeling that experience.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#304

Post by visarga »

watwut wrote: post #118
kristianc wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't happen, for two reasons. One is that great deal of open-source software and hobbyist knowledge sharing has never been driven by financial reward anyway and people will continue to do it anyway. Finer grained controls over opt-outs would be great (the equivalent of a search engine 'nofollow' would be great and will hopefully come with time). Many kinds of technology faced this kind of tragedy of the commons a…

It will happen and it already started to happen. It started to happen even before LLM, when google started to hide smaller personal blogs in its search result. Expectation of the monetary reward has nothing to do with it, discoverability does. Culture of creating content does not exist when people cant see what others created and know no one will see what they created. A lot of smaller open source was monkey see monk…

The centralized choke point of web search is getting relaxed now. Unlike search engines and social networks, you can download a LLM and run it. A small one, but capable of using a library of search stubs to directly fetch information from hubs, feeds and other search engines. You can own the agent who can solve the web search part for you.

Imagine you have a 4B model and keep an equal size corpus of search stubs, small MD documents linking to hubs, feeds and search engines for millions of topics. You can use the LLM to read the stub and perform the search for you, all orchestrated locally, with greater privacy and independence. You can dis-intermediate the search chokepoint now. You can set the criteria for what to include, exclude, how to rank and present the results.

This works because good entry points for any topic change slowly over time. The construction of search stubs is trivial with existing AI agents, and can be shared as open source. A few GB for the model, a few for the search routing layer, and you got a sovereign local agent.

If this holds, access control shifts from whatever Google thinks maximizes profit to whatever the community thinks has value.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#305

Post by onebluecloud »

m132 wrote: post #26
kristianc wrote: post #10

I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling the "deep expertise" OP laments was actually deeply inconvenient to many people. I understand that there's a good living to be made from knowing browser quirks, hand-rolling accessible components, mastering CSS specificity, but this is largely accidental complexity. More people building things is straightforwardly good, and if some of those things are slower or less accessible, that'…

The problem is, mastering accessibility, intuitiveness, compatibility, responsiveness, scalability, architecture, performance, and all those other less immediately visible, "forward-thinking" parts of UX/software development has always been difficult. Ultra high-level frameworks and now LLMs have, on the other hand, made it even easier to botch all of these and quickly roll out a half-baked MVP. The gap between "acce…

[flagged]

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#306

Post by NietTim »

fg137 wrote: post #213
jillesvangurp wrote: post #58

We're in the software industry. The whole point of that industry is automating things that are very repetitive. Frontend projects are very repetitive. And now AI is doing that for us. Fantastic, fees up a lot of time to build more interesting things. De-skilling for skills that just aren't that relevant anymore because we've solved the problem (with AI or otherwise) has been a constant in our industry ever since comp…

You might be surprised to find out that there aren't that many "interesting things" to build.

That just means you lack creativity, exploring new ideas and building new interesting things is easier then ever, all you need is an idea.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#307

Post by unnouinceput »

I actually love this deskilling. It means your project will accumulate unseen consequences that at one point in the future, several hiring churns done meanwhile, you'll need to hire an actual competent programmer to untangle the entire spaghetti code. And don;t come at me with "but AI will be able to do just that". Yeah, the same way that OS'es kept growing in size with each hardware leap (remember 1 GB XP installation was a shock?), the same way the code that better models will spit out will grow too. And then when 20 prompts later the AI will hallucinate a shitload of new classes, the boss is going to finally be at the crossroads "scratch this and restart or pay the consultant a crapload of money" question. And I will wait just around the corner to be that consultant. For me the future is looking bright actually.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#308

Post by watwut »

visarga wrote: post #304
watwut wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will happen and it already started to happen. It started to happen even before LLM, when google started to hide smaller personal blogs in its search result. Expectation of the monetary reward has nothing to do with it, discoverability does. Culture of creating content does not exist when people cant see what others created and know no one will see what they created. A lot of smaller open source was monkey see monk…

The centralized choke point of web search is getting relaxed now. Unlike search engines and social networks, you can download a LLM and run it. A small one, but capable of using a library of search stubs to directly fetch information from hubs, feeds and other search engines. You can own the agent who can solve the web search part for you. Imagine you have a 4B model and keep an equal size corpus of search stubs, sma…

None of that will create a community of people sharing. You wont find what another guy wrote and he knows that no one will see it if he writes it.

But most crutially, what you described is not an actual thing people do.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#309

Post by Jensson »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #203
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can, in theory. But when the signal to noise ratio gets too low, it becomes prohibitively difficult to filter out the garbage. Thus I don't think it's true that more people creating things is a pure benefit. It may not even prove to be a benefit at all, on net.

That's what critics are for. In our decentralized media environment it is not difficult to find critics for whatever youre interested in

Critics has the same issue, they will also be mostly AI generated. How do you find the good non-AI generated and unpaid critics in the future?

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#310

Post by raincole »

kristianc wrote: post #10

I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling the "deep expertise" OP laments was actually deeply inconvenient to many people. I understand that there's a good living to be made from knowing browser quirks, hand-rolling accessible components, mastering CSS specificity, but this is largely accidental complexity. More people building things is straightforwardly good, and if some of those things are slower or less accessible, that'…

I fully agree. The reason that LLMs seemingly defy No Silver Bullet is that the premise of that theory is flawed. Software development has been mostly accidental complexity, not essential complexity. Actually I believe even with LLMs' help, the accidental part still takes the lion's share of the total complexity.
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